Thread (41 messages) 41 messages, 7 authors, 2012-08-18

Re: [PATCH 0/4] promote zcache from staging

From: Seth Jennings <hidden>
Date: 2012-08-17 23:33:35
Also in: lkml

On 08/17/2012 05:21 PM, Dan Magenheimer wrote:
quoted
From: Seth Jennings [mailto:sjenning@linux.vnet.ibm.com]
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/4] promote zcache from staging

On 08/09/2012 03:20 PM, Dan Magenheimer wrote
quoted
I also wonder if you have anything else unusual in your
test setup, such as a fast swap disk (mine is a partition
on the same rotating disk as source and target of the kernel build,
the default install for a RHEL6 system)?
I'm using a normal SATA HDD with two partitions, one for
swap and the other an ext3 filesystem with the kernel source.
quoted
Or have you disabled cleancache?
Yes, I _did_ disable cleancache.  I could see where having
cleancache enabled could explain the difference in results.
Sorry to beat a dead horse, but I meant to report this
earlier in the week and got tied up by other things.

I finally got my test scaffold set up earlier this week
to try to reproduce my "bad" numbers with the RHEL6-ish
config file.

I found that with "make -j28" and "make -j32" I experienced
__DATA CORRUPTION__.  This was repeatable.
I actually hit this for the first time a few hours ago when
I was running performance for your rewrite.  I didn't know
what to make of it yet.  The 24-thread kernel build failed
when both frontswap and cleancache were enabled.
The type of error led me to believe that the problem was
due to concurrency of cleancache reclaim.  I did not try
with cleancache disabled to prove/support this theory
but it is consistent with the fact that you (Seth) have not
seen a similar problem and has disabled cleancache.

While this problem is most likely in my code and I am
suitably chagrined, it re-emphasizes the fact that
the current zcache in staging is 20-month old "demo"
code.  The proposed new zcache codebase handles concurrency
much more effectively.
I imagine this can be solved without rewriting the entire
codebase.  If your new code contains a fix for this, can we
just pull it as a single patch?

Seth

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